第51章

We frolic while tis May.

It has now to be realized that nearly three-quarters of a year have passed away.In place of the autumnal scenery which formed a setting to the previous enactments,we have the culminating blooms of summer in the year following.

Stephen is in India,slaving away at an office in Bombay;occasionally going up the country on professional errands,and wondering why people who had been there longer than he complained so much of the effect of the climate upon their constitutions.

Never had a young man a finer start than seemed now to present itself to Stephen.It was just in that exceptional heyday of prosperity which shone over Bombay some few years ago,that he arrived on the scene.Building and engineering partook of the general impetus.Speculation moved with an accelerated velocity every successive day,the only disagreeable contingency connected with it being the possibility of a collapse.

Elfride had never told her father of the four-and-twenty-hours

escapade with Stephen,nor had it,to her knowledge,come to his ears by any other route.It was a secret trouble and grief to the girl for a short time,and Stephens departure was another ingredient in her sorrow.But Elfride possessed special facilities for getting rid of trouble after a decent interval.

Whilst a slow nature was imbibing a misfortune little by little,she had swallowed the whole agony of it at a draught and was brightening again.She could slough off a sadness and replace it by a hope as easily as a lizard renews a diseased limb.

And two such excellent distractions had presented themselves.One was bringing out the romance and looking for notices in the papers,which,though they had been significantly short so far,had served to divert her thoughts.The other was migrating from the vicarage to the more commodious old house of Mrs.Swancourts,overlooking the same valley.Mr.Swancourt at first disliked the idea of being transplanted to feminine soil,but the obvious advantages of such an accession of dignity reconciled him to the change.So there was a radical move;the two ladies staying at Torquay as had been arranged,the vicar going to and fro.

Mrs.Swancourt considerably enlarged Elfrides ideas in an aristocratic direction,and she began to forgive her father for his politic marriage.Certainly,in a worldly sense,a handsome face at three-and-forty had never served a man in better stead.

The new house at Kensington was ready,and they were all in town.

The Hyde Park shrubs had been transplanted as usual,the chairs ranked in line,the grass edgings trimmed,the roads made to look as if they were suffering from a heavy thunderstorm;carriages had been called for by the easeful,horses by the brisk,and the Drive and Row were again the groove of gaiety for an hour.We gaze upon the spectacle,at six oclock on this midsummer afternoon,in a melon-frame atmosphere and beneath a violet sky.The Swancourt equipage formed one in the stream.

Mrs.Swancourt was a talker of talk of the incisive kind,which her low musical voice--the only beautiful point in the old woman--prevented from being wearisome.

Now,she said to Elfride,who,like AEneas at Carthage,was full of admiration for the brilliant scene,you will find that our companionless state will give us,as it does everybody,an extraordinary power in reading the features of our fellow-creatures here.I always am a listener in such places as these--not to the narratives told by my neighbourstongues,but by their faces--the advantage of which is,that whether I am in Row,Boulevard,Rialto,or Prado,they all speak the same language.I may have acquired some skill in this practice through having been an ugly lonely woman for so many years,with nobody to give me information;a thing you will not consider strange when the parallel case is borne in mind,--how truly people who have no clocks will tell the time of day.

Ay,that they will,said Mr.Swancourt corroboratively.I have known labouring men at Endelstow and other farms who had framed complete systems of observation for that purpose.By means of shadows,winds,clouds,the movements of sheep and oxen,the singing of birds,the crowing of cocks,and a hundred other sights and sounds which people with watches in their pockets never know the existence of,they are able to pronounce within ten minutes of the hour almost at any required instant.That reminds me of an old story which Im afraid is too bad--too bad to repeat.Here the vicar shook his head and laughed inwardly.

Tell it--do!said the ladies.

I mustnt quite tell it.

Thats absurd,said Mrs.Swancourt.

It was only about a man who,by the same careful system of observation,was known to deceive persons for more than two years into the belief that he kept a barometer by stealth,so exactly did he foretell all changes in the weather by the braying of his ass and the temper of his wife.

Elfride laughed.

Exactly,said Mrs.Swancourt.And in just the way that those learnt the signs of nature,I have learnt the language of her illegitimate sister--artificiality;and the fibbing of eyes,the contempt of nose-tips,the indignation of back hair,the laughter of clothes,the cynicism of footsteps,and the various emotions lying in walking-stick twirls,hat-liftings,the elevation of parasols,the carriage of umbrellas,become as A B C to me.

Just look at that daughters sister class of mamma in the carriage across there,she continued to Elfride,pointing with merely a turn of her eye.The absorbing self-consciousness of her position that is shown by her countenance is most humiliating to a lover of ones country.You would hardly believe,would you,that members of a Fashionable World,whose professed zero is far above the highest degree of the humble,could be so ignorant of the elementary instincts of reticence.

How?

Why,to bear on their faces,as plainly as on a phylactery,the inion,"Do,pray,look at the coronet on my panels."